After giving its price-performance ratio a huge boost in late December, Dell introduced an even newer value variant of the Adamo ultra-slim ultra-portable notebook. The company's latest offer includes a 13.4-inch Adamo priced at US $799 ($100 less than the performance variant introduced last month), and driven by Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 (clocked at 1.40 GHz), and 2 GB of memory. The 13.4-inch screen offers 1366 x 768 pixels resolution, and the chipset embeds Intel GMA X4500 graphics. Storage is care of a 128 GB SSD. Connectivity includes WiFi and Bluetooth. Other features include a 1.3 megapixel webcam. Windows 7 Home Premium x64 comes preinstalled.

Dell's iconic ultra-portable, the Adamo, got a much-needed specifications update, along with a welcome drop in price of the base model. The 13-inch 0.65" thick notebook now starts at US $899 (earlier $1100), and features faster hardware, including Intel Core 2 Duo SL9600 processor clocked at 2.10 GHz (compared to the much slower Core 2 Duo SU9300 1.20 GHz), Intel X4500 graphics, 4 GB of memory, a 128 GB SSD storage, and connectivity that includes WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1 EDR. It comes with Windows 7 Home Premium x64 pre-installed.

System BIOS vendor Phoenix Technology, the company behind the popular Award BIOS software found on several PC motherboards, has come up with a new highly-optimized implementation of UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), that can boot the OS in under one second. This cuts time of the arbitrary 5~15 second (typical) POST process. With this time saved, system startup times are significantly reduced. Startup times are further reduced by the optimized startup procedure on Windows 7.

To put this to test, a Dell Adamo notebook with the technology, was able to reach the Windows Desktop in 20 seconds from the push of the power button, while Lenovo T400 notebooks with faster SSDs reached the Desktop in under 10 seconds. The technology should be out pretty soon.

This morning, Dell's Michael Tatelman, VP of consumer sales & marketing, officially exposed to daylight for the first time the company's much-rumored Adamo ultra-thin luxury laptop. A pre-production sample was shown in front of the public at CES 2009. During the presentation and after that there where no details, specs, prices or what so ever disclosed. Dell only unveiled that anodized aluminum and glass are used in the laptop's chassis. When ready Adamo will come in two color options: black and white/silver. Have a look at the first Adamo pictures: